Check Out My Business Associates

Several weeks ago, Ranae Gable of In Touch Marketing Concepts, Ltd. and I decided to start a practice of visiting one local business of interest to explore to character and needs of smaller entrepreneurial firms, to test the needs of marketing and advertising in the current economical climate.

This exploration is gut-level and totally non-scientific, we are exploring by instinct, and plain curiosity. It has been a warm-hearted exchange of ideas and inspirations.

Our first “Official” visit was to the studio of Margaret Almon of Nutmeg Designs of Lansdale. Margaret and her husband, Wayne Stratz are mosaic glass artists who create designs, that “Catch the Eye and Delight the Soul.”

The challenges that face craft-based artists are extreme in a financial climate where the purchases of luxury items including artwork have become scarce. The cost of promotion, display, warehousing, packaging and shipping added to the rising costs of fine materials is a universal challenge faced by artists all over.

We learned that craft shows are still the major outlet followed by online sales and word-of-mouth recommendations from admirers. There is much to be admired and marveled over, Celtic Crosses and Rainbows at Nutmeg Designs.

I love this video because it highlights the bane of many creative artists’ existence. The creative community in my experience is one of the most generous as a group, offering ideas, art, execution and participation, blood, sweat and tears to so many worthwhile efforts.

However, why is it that once exposed as a “giver” do people expect you to give and give and give, to profitable businesses? Have you been labeled a “push-over?”

Ranae Gabel, co-founder of In Touch Marketing Concepts, <http://www.intouchmarketingconcepts.com> and I were having coffee at Starbucks the other day, and got into an amazingly entertaining discussion about CLIENTS v. FREEBIES.

To that end, we are planning to offer an INTRO into marketing….FREE.

Just as soon as we can figure out how to get paid for it.

In the meantime, please be entertained by the link below. The creator has offered it to other creators whose clients want the invoice to read

Everyone in the ad business lives in ultimate fear of the one typo that will sink the ship. And almost every piece of literature printed has a typo, you just hope that it will be of low impact and overlooked by the majority of readers. So why did they let it off of the printers loading dock?